This invention relates to false alarm phrases in word spotting.
Word spotting systems can be used to locate queries in media, for example, in multimedia files with audio components. In a word spotting system, a search query and a body of media are processed to determine locations in the media that most likely match the query. Such matches are referred to as putative hits (putative instances) of the query. Among these putative hits usually will be a set of false positives (“false alarms”), which are hits that do not correspond to actual occurrences of the query. There are a number of factors that may contribute to false positives. For example, the speech associated with a false positive may be phonetically similar to the search query yet not represent the desired query. This similarity may not be predictable or obvious to the user, for example, because the false hit may not occur at true word boundaries in the media.